Thanks for answering a question I didn’t ask. Seems something you excel at
Here is my first post: “I keep seeing this, and I didn’t see the answer in this thread (might not have looked well enough) but what law was being broken by the flight crews’ instructions? I mean, if the instructions were illegal, they must be breaking some law, right? Which law exactly?”
Never mind the fact that I don’t know what “Som” means except the name of a girl I know in Thailand and I don’t know why you would be talking to her or calling me her name, I don’t see how my first post could be “wrong” when it was a few simple questions.
So whatever. I’m willing to bet that the aircrew doesn’t get charged with extortion. They don’t even have to be convicted. I bet you $100 they don’t even get charged with extortion. You don’t need to answer anything else I posted in this thread, just put your money where your poorly reasoned outrage is.
Well, your question was useless, and only acted as a failed attempt at a gotcha.
I answered your question honestly, even if the question itself was not an honest question.
Which I replied to, explaining my reasoning on why it ticks off all the boxes in the illinois criminal code for intimidation. I also offered to soften my wording to unlawful, as I specifically didn’t want to get into such a dumb semantic argument as I am currently having with you. You refused to accept either of those, and continued on your tirade, against many posters who never even used the word in this thread.
Even absent breaking criminal law, what they did, as has been explained by a few legal eagles to you in this thread, is accurately described as illegal. So, even absent breaking a law, their orders were illegal, which means that when your very first question said “if the instructions were illegal, they must be breaking some law, right?” you were already operating off of faulty information, and making an incorrect statement.
Sorry for the slight typo, did we want to go on for a few pages about that? I meant “So,” all apologies for confusing you.
Your post wasn’t wrong, your assumptions when you made the post, and a statement that made up most of your post were. Questions are fine, they mean that you are looking to learn something new.
As I already said in the very first post that I mentioned extortion that I doubted that they would be charged with it, no bet.
I can also walk out of my shop, and cross the road against the light. I’ll bet you $100 I don’t get charged with jaywalking.
No here is the point. The airline cannot remove a passenger except for very specific violations that Dao did not commit. So if he had already boarded by taking his seat as implied by the United website then they had no right to remove him and if it were in California it would be conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
Ahhh (some people say) but nowhere is boarding defined so lets say that a passenger is “boarding” until the door of the plane is closed. Well then the airline violated other laws. So we point that out to say that no matter when boarding ended, United violated the law.
Actually, one of the stories linked earlier in the thread, written by a lawyer who specializes in this sort of stuff, deals with the issue of definitions in contracts. He says:
If you had asked 1000 passengers what “boarding” meant, before this incident occurred, i’ll bet that at least 90 percent of them would have given you a definition something like the second paragraph in the above quote. If you asked regular airline passengers, “When have you (as a passenger) completed boarding?”, i’ll bet most of them would say something like: “When i’m on the plane and sitting in my assigned seat.”
That is very true and I believe I was the first one in this thread to point out that according to United, and absent any definition to the contrary, that boarding was completed when you sit down. My point to manson was that United cannot weasel out of having committed illegal acts even if the retroactively redefine “boarding” to mean when the door is shut*.
*Although I agree with the “once you’re seated” definition, I can see how United could argue boarding is not complete for anybody until the door is shut as you are still allowed reasonable ingress and egress from the plane at will.
I did want to come back to this. Sorry, I thought you meant to type “Son” as in calling me “Son” and it irked me so I provided that response. If you meant “So” then I retract my snarky response to it.
Good on them for changing their policies. Hopefully the other airlines are paying attention and “not violently dragging passengers off planes” will become a permanent policy for all of them. It’s sad they had to experience a shit storm of bad publicity before they realized this was a bad idea, but at least they figured it out eventually.
Tried to force a family to hold a toddler in their lap instead of using a seat that they had paid for. One employee even decided to rewrite their own policies & FAA rules & advice saying that a 2-year-old cannot be in a seat, or occupy a car seat, and needed to be sitting an adult’s lap.
I don’t think that family on Delta was in the right. They bought the seat for their 18-year-old, but he took an earlier flight. They argued since they bought this ticket, they could seat whoever they wanted there. That’s not how airlines tickets work, though. They’re not exchangeable, but apply only to the person whose name is on the ticket.
And did the 18-year-old fly on Delta? If so, then they certainly already got use of their money.
If the ticketing agent said that, then he or she was contradicting the policy of basically every airline ever.
Anyone who has flown more than three times in their life knows that you can’t just hand your airline ticket to another person, and that the name on the ticket needs to match the name on the ID of the flying customer.
Is this a good policy? Personally, i don’t think so. I think it’s in place largely so the airlines can screw people out of money they’ve already paid for a ticket. I think that tickets should be much more easily transferable. But there is absolutely no question that it’s standard policy on the vast majority of airlines for the vast majority of tickets.
If i book a ticket to San Francisco, and can’t make the flight for some reason, i can’t just hand my ticket to my friend because i know that he needs to fly to San Francisco that same day. The only difference here is that the alternate passenger was a member of the same family, and was a child. If the airline had truly approved the switcheroo, as the guy claimed, then it seems likely that they would have reissued the ticket in the child’s name.
Of course, one of the big problems with airlines, as with no many customer service industries, is that there seem to be so many employees who either don’t know the policies, or are willing to break them under certain circumstances. There is also often a complete lack of communication between employees. It wouldn’t surprise me very much if one Delta employee told the family it would be fine, but didn’t convey that information to the other employees on the plane.
